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A Creative Income guest post by Rebecca George, owner of Purple and Lime, Inc.
Winter is (thankfully!!!) almost over, so it’s time to start cleaning out your Etsy shop for spring. The renewal of energy of Springtime offers the perfect opportunity to work on improving your tags, policies, photos, and more. This will prepare your shop for the rest of the year, increase sales, and get your store more views!
1. Update Your Photos
Photos are crucial to success on Etsy. Each item listing can only have five photos, so choose them wisely. Go through your oldest pictures first and assess what to improve. Are they blurry? Are there more detailed views you can add? Can you photograph your product next to a ruler or another object for scale? Also consider how sellers of similar items are taking their photos. Don’t copy them exactly but instead pick up on what yours are lacking. For example, if you sell wall decals and most other Etsy sellers creating decals are showing full room shots, that might be the way to go for your images.
2. Complete Your “About” Page
An often overlooked but important part of your Etsy store is the About page. Not to be confused with your profile page, the About page is designed to show shoppers your store’s inspiration and artistic process as well as any additional shop members/outside manufacturers (if you have any). Adding your “Shop Story” and photos to your About page helps customers understand how you make and create your goods (or how you source if you sell vintage or supplies).
You can also link your social media accounts, blog, and website- just make sure not to connect to a site where you sell directly outside of Etsy. There is a “two click” rule to keep you from funneling sales through other payment systems and web stores. Find and edit your About page by clicking on the link at the lower left side of your store (on the desktop version), at the top of your shop at the “Edit About Page” link, or click “edit” directly on the About page.
3. Clean Up Your Tags
Effective tags are one of the best ways to have your items found by shoppers on the site. Check all of your item tags to make sure there aren’t duplicates and that you’ve used all of the available tag spaces. Two word tag phrases hold more weight on Etsy than single words so think like a buyer would when searching online. It’s okay to repeat words but not as exactly the same tag. For example, my raven necklace would include the tags “raven jewelry” and “bird jewelry” because in this case it’s okay to have “jewelry” in both tags, just don’t use “raven jewelry” for two tags. Remember that your tags are only searchable on Etsy and do not have any relevance on other search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
4. Review Your Shop Policies
The last spring cleaning step is rereading and adjusting your store’s policies page if needed. The date of your last update is visible at the bottom of the page- if it’s been quite a while take a look at them again. As a seller it’s important to be fair to your customers and yourself while still abiding by Etsy’s Terms of Use (TOU).
Once you’ve updated these four areas of your store, keep checking your stats to see which techniques are working for you!
How do you keep your Etsy shop running in tip top shape?
Rebecca George
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Thank you for the advice! I frequently re-photograph my roll-over items when imaging new things, and create a new shop banner, etc… but I never thought to update my Shop Policies!